User talk:Leaky caldron/Archives/2013/January

WT:RFA
This Rfacom is so ... well, I'm almost embarrassed to bring it up, how many people are going to volunteer to give up their right to vote? The only reason I'm bringing it up is that, lately, all the comments seem to be more in line with that proposal than with some of the others. Including several of your comments ... for instance, "It has been said that RFA is far too hostile and unfair on the candidate due to the aggressive challenging and counter-challenging by supporters and opposers. An obvious solution to this problem is to introduce RfA moderators." I think what most voters are doing now ... typically just picking one issue and trying to say something straightforward about it, and not saying anything else ... is about all that most voters are willing to do. If we bring in moderators, who might for instance encourage people to clarify things, or ask them not to say things or to respond better ... it's just more than most voters can or want to deal with, and I don't blame them, really ... except on the simplest issues and in the simplest cases, voting at RfA is really hard for people who don't make it a habit. I completely agree with your view that the candidates deserve moderated, competent discussion, and the fact that they're not getting it is part of the reason we don't have enough candidates ... I just don't see the voters supplying that. Your comment was one of those "last straw" comments that pushed me over the edge into offering my own take ... I thought I was going to sit this one out. - Dank (push to talk) 21:57, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Re: "fairness" at WT:RFA: sorry. I think we share the frustration that we're both content guys ... I've got a big stack of articles to review, and I can't put the same kind of time into RfA reform that I could three years ago, so I'm writing fast and not doing as much careful listening. What I'm saying is: a quarter as many people are passing RfA compared to three years ago. We have slightly fewer active editors now ... but then, there's a higher proportion of "serious" active editors now, so it might be that the number of people who might theoretically be candidates is the same. I don't mean that we're all being unfair at RfA in the sense of being mean, I think we're collectively trying our best and making reasonable decisions. But we still can't escape the consequences of the appearance of disenfranchisement, regardless of whether the net effect on Wikipedia is acceptable ... any more than it would work to argue that making it four times as hard for blacks to vote would be perfectly okay, as long as the candidates who get elected aren't racist. When people feel that their entire group (in this case, recent Wikipedians) is being unfairly refused access to the power and privileges that are available to people who happened to get here before they did, then they start acting up and stop supporting the system. That's my take on the situation, anyway. I don't think we need to ramp up the passing rate by a factor of four, I think we need to do a combination of things to address the problem: look for potential candidates, help them understand what they need to pass, make RfA a lot more pleasant and even-handed ... and we might also make the argument that for all those people getting promoted 3 years ago, it's not like they're all lounging around telling people what to do these days ... most of them aren't active, and most of them have worked very hard, and faced some difficulties in part because their RfAs didn't serve them very well. - Dank (push to talk) 19:38, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

 * The reason I went back to the noticeboard was not to draw you into further debate but to highlight the erroneous statement that the discussion had been "exemplary". Any discussion that contains accusations of blatant lying cannot, almost by definition, be an outstanding example of how discussions should be conducted. I had read you apology and accepted it without response. Now that you raise it again here, it is only fair to query your statement that as soon as you realised that the comment was inappropriate you removed it. That does not appear to be the case since your initial response was to deny that it was a personal attack with an edit summary of "out of order?".

It was only after the comments made by other editors, including an Admin., that you modified the offending comments. You did not accept my initial comment saying I thought it was out of order and were only convinced to do so when other editors highlighted it to you. If, as you say, "Sometimes what I write and what I think are not the same, and the message gets disorted [sic]", I would suggest that you need to think twice and write once. Leaky Caldron  12:25, 18 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, I didnt find my comments to be a personal attack until several users noted it to be possibly insulting, which was why I retracted it and apologized to anyone who could have felt insulted, not only to you, because it wasn't pointed at you, and it has nothing to do with the fact that one of the users asking me there to reconsider was an admin but with the fact that I'm not the kind of user who likes to go around insulting people. Anyways, this message I left here was a gesture from me, to you; not an attempt to resume this issue. Happy editing. — ΛΧΣ  21  15:13, 18 January 2013 (UTC)